Game Review: Saints Row 2, XBox 360

Do you remember the good old days? When game manufacturers fully realised that gamers don’t really need a motivation and a back story to make them want to kill everything on screen? The good old days, when Grand Theft Auto 1 was released, and Carmageddon 1 and 2 were made. Those were the days. Somewhere along the way, however, game designers started shoe-horning backstories and motivations into games where the goal is “kill everything”, and as a consequence, these games became pretentious. Thank god, however, for Saints Row 2: a game that brings back the good old days of mindless violence – just for the fun of it.

Some of you might remember I was pretty harsh about the world of modern gaming; too much mindless violence, no decent story telling, too little content, too much focus on tits. How on earth could I like a game like Saints Row 2, where both violence and tits (in the form of an endless supply of strippers and prostitutes) are more or less the pillars of the game?

Pretentiousness.

There is a world of difference between a game that tries to cover up the truth, and a game that just blatantly comes out and says it like it is. Many games that are essentially all about violence and tits try to cover it up by writing some sort of excuse into the story, explaining why the protagonist should kill everyone, why tits are important, providing a motivation for the player to perform the mindless killing. That’s what we call pretentiousness. You may call yourself an escort girl and have a chauffeur driving you in a fancy limousine to your next customer, but the fact of the matter is you’re still a whore.

Then there are games like Saints Row 2, which grabs pretentious games by the ears, kicks them to the curb, and flings poo at them. Saints Row 2 doesn’t give you a motivation, no backstory, no emotional nonsense. They just give you a sandbox city filled with a never-ending stream of squishy bloodbags, cars, and guns, knowing full well that gamers don’t need any motivation to start killing every one.

The game itself even makes fun of pretentious games. During one of the story missions, you are going to rob a casino run by a rivalling gang. One of your gang members has made a model of the casino, including figures representing everyone in it, and is patiently explaining his detailed plan to rob the casino without shedding a drop of blood. At that point, your gang leader takes the figures that represent your gang, moves them to the front entrance of the casino, and states: “Why don’t we just walk in and shoot every motherfucker between us and the money? Would be a lot more fun.”

Yes, Saints Row 2 is a Grand Theft Auto clone, but it does it so well, it’s actually better than the original. It’s a better GTA than GTA, because it has a clear understanding of its target audience. The game has more of a wacky, almost cartoonish feel to it. Realism has been thrown out the window in favour of plain fun. Run people over, and they launch 100 metres into the air like ragdolls. The cars don’t handle realistically – they handle in such a way that you can actually drive around town without getting into a crash every three seconds. You can take more bullets than an armoured tank, and your health regenerates. Unrealistic, yes, but it makes the mindless violence so much easier. It doesn’t break the flow.

So, the goal of the game is to take over the entire city, eliminating rival gangs in a series of story missions. In order to gain access to the story missions, however, you need to build up respect points by completing mini games. A few examples of the mini games you find in Saints Row 2: drive around in a septic truck and spray as much expensive homes, office buildings, people, and cars with poo. Then there’s my favourite, where you have to get hit by as many cars as possible. The laws of physics are discarded here, allowing you to be launched hundreds of metres into the air, bouncing from building to tree to ground. Then there’s this one where you drive around on a flaming quad, setting as many cars, people, and things on fire as possible. There are other ways to gain respect, such as dramatic car jumps, two-wheel driving, handbrake turns, headshots, ballshots (by lack of a better term), and my favourite: jumping out of a driving car.

There’s a downside to the respect system. It leads to this retarded situation further down the line where you own over 2/3 of the city, but you still have to earn enough respect by flinging poo around in order to gain access to the next story mission. The respect system is also a bit messed up; you’d figure that a gangster would gain more respect by mowing down 50 enemy gang members in an office building than by performing crowd control at a porn star’s autograph session.

To make matters worse, the mini games have this odd difficulty curve where, after having completed the first 2 or 3 levels, they become undoable. Maybe a hard core 12 year old gamer can pull those off, but I was put off pretty quickly.

The game also understands its audience when it comes to character customisation. There is so much to change about your character it easily beats most modern role playing games. Want to be an obese fat African American wearing nothing but a thong? Be my guest. Want to be a heroine addicted girl with dreadlocks wearing a cowboy hat? Go ahead. Trust me, there’s something mesmerising about mowing down 40 police officers as a blonde, blue-eyed picture-perfect Playboy model wearing tiny red hotpants, red stiletto heals, loose silken blouse, flower-patterned bikini, covered in red tribal and flower tattoos, wearing a red cowboy hat. Customisation is important in the game as the more you trick your character, cars, and homes out, the more style points you get, which act as multiplier for the respect points system. Shallow? Of course. Pointless? Sure. Fun? Hell yeah!

Conclusion

Looking back to the last few months of owning an XBox 360, I have to say that while I found Mass Effect the most intriguing and well-written game (and therefore, the best), and while I found Fallout 3 the most immersive (~120 hours of play time!), Saints Row 2 was the most fun game to play. And isn’t that one of the primary goals of a game?

In order to play this game, you need to be able to get off your high horse, and simply admit to your instincts to just have mindless fun. Saints Row 2 is the porn film of the game world. You won’t be proud of enjoying it, and you won’t shout it off the rooftops when you’re “done”, but that doesn’t mean it leaves you with any less of a satisfied feeling.

A definitive buy.

Game details

Title: Saints Row 2

Platform: XBox 360

Release date: October 2008

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Interesting link you posted. While it is stated the difference between the two groups was measured in seconds, I can not help but think that for the human brain, which has a speed unparalleled by any supercomputer, a few seconds is quite a long time.

That said, the effects of violent media proved small for the most part, coming down to a couple seconds or a few percentage points.

Should we take then that these individuals basically stopped and thought about something they simply should not be in a perfect world. I would like to see the results after a group has seen a film from the new breed of torture porn that sadly is getting popular. Most would be familiar with the Hostel or Saw series, but there are smaller budget/indie films that go even way beyond those. Films that have absolutely no redeeming value other than to play into the sick and twisted fantasies of sick and twisted people. Not in favor of censorship, but more and more these films really test that belief.

I can not help but think that for the human brain, which has a speed unparalleled by any supercomputer, a few seconds is quite a long time.

Actually, the human brain is very slow by modern computing standards. Think about how long it takes you to figure out something you’ve never done before, like learning to catch a ball or fly a helicopter. The reason that our brains are so powerful is because of its massive pre-processing capabilities. We call it practice, but what we’re doing when we’re practicing, rehearsing, or training is setting up neural connections, so when we come across a similar scenario, we can react with immediacy. Our brains have massively parallel processing, but it’s quite slow in Megahertz.

ASCI Purple, which will be built first and used to simulate nuclear tests, will be able to complete 100 thousand billion calculations per second â€” a speed known as 100 teraflops that some scientists say is comparable to the human brain.

Anyways, I thought the point of the original article was not that they claim violence in media leads to violence as many of you are writing. Instead, the conclusion is that exposure desensitizes people. This is much different than drawing a direct link (i.e playing Grand Theft Auto will lead you to cause violence). This isn’t exactly new, as there have been numerous studies for decades now. This merely makes the statement that such exposure does have an effect regarding our interaction with others.

Now more importantly, the article in question does not give us the actual thesis, but rather a summary of events. It seems that people are more quick to shoot the messenger so to speak, i.e. question every aspect and henceforth claim the study as flawed, thus the conclusion is flawed. Instead just take this at face value as it is just an article. At least wait to see if their is a rebuttal after submission to Psychological Science.

Exactly, which you’d think the government, at least, would be happy about, since they’ve no problem sending 18 year olds to Iraq or Afghanistan. Although alot of parents don’t seem to have a problem with it either. And when these vets come back with the thousand yard stare they still don’t have a problem with it, but they’re some of the same people complaining about video game violence.

First neither group was tested before hand to set a base for their individual reaction times. The differences are in SECONDS. Obviously some people think SLOWER than others. Maybe they were considering the personal threat if becoming involved.

After a few seconds everyone seems to become involved. If people were really desensitized they would never become involved. And at no point is the group dynamic addressed.

One can be a good samaritan, and still watch 300 and The Ruins and play GTA.

I saw that comment and immediately thought non issue. If the groups are randomly assigned, which in any of these studies they are, and you have a decent sample size you shouldn’t worry all that much about the underlining differences in the two groups. More specifically the baseline, whatever that means, average response times of the two groups should not be statistically different.

The interpretation is relative not absoloute. Games labeled “violent” relative to those labeled “non-violent”.

First neither group was tested before hand to set a base for their individual reaction times. The differences are in SECONDS. Obviously some people think SLOWER than others. Maybe they were considering the personal threat if becoming involved.

After a few seconds everyone seems to become involved. If people were really desensitized they would never become involved. And at no point is the group dynamic addressed.

One can be a good samaritan, and still watch 300 and The Ruins and play GTA.

You are quoting from a comment some anonymous person has posted as fact. Did either actually read the study?

In regards to the whole

The differences are in SECONDS. Obviously some people think SLOWER than others

The whole point is that the group that watched the violence had a delayed reaction. Are you implying that by some miracle all the slow people somehow managed accidentally and randomly be in just the one group?

The whole point is that if watching such violence does have an impact, even if it is a delayed reaction, this still warrants further study and discussion. Outright dismissal is the same as censorship. Fact of the matter is that every time some study comes out like this, kids always react the same. But I would rather take the opinions of educated researchers over that of a 17 year old gamer. Sorry.

There’s another vitally important piece of information they left out, and that is the standard deviation. The article merely claims that people who played the violent video game took five times longer to help… but not all of them did. Certainly five times longer looks significant, but it has to be an average of everyone’s results. I can almost guarantee you a few people who played the violent video game responded to it in faster than 16 seconds.

Put it another way, the spread between how people scored the fight was 5.9 to 6.4. We don’t know how much overlap there was. If the violent group on average scored it somewhere between 5.5 and 6.5, we might have something. If they scored it between 4 and 8… maybe not.

I’d also like to note this story from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7826663.stm. In short, kid shoots parents because they took away Halo 3. I know plenty of people who have played Halo 3, and they are neither violent, nor so attached to it they’d plan murderous revenge if it were taken from them, and yet I’m sure some people will be championing this as proof of causation.

I generally take the opposite line on topics dealing with, for instance, the NRA and gun control, but that’s because I can’t really conceive of a reason to have a gun other than violence: shooting or threatening to shoot someone/thing.

There’s a term for that in media studies: the “Hypodermic-Needle Theory of Media.” It refers to the notion that, during the consumption of media, the content flows into the audience’s brain (as if it were injected using a hypodermic needle) and directly causes them to act in certain ways.

It’s normally used as a derisive term, being seen as an incredibly-simplistic way of looking at the relationship between media and the audience.

Ever since I got my first computer I’ve loved to play violent and speedy games. Started with Wolfenstein 3D, Doom 1 & 2, Rise of the Triad, then on to Carmageddon 1 & 2 and so forth.. I still have never even once in my life hit anyone physically, I’ve not even planned to commit a murder or anything like that. Hell, I absolutely hate violence in real life. I only like it in games where it actually doesn’t hurt any living being.

Oh, about the “test”..Well, if I heard two people fighting I wouldn’t get involved. Why? Because I am afraid of violence. I’d of course call the police if it looked like any of the participants would get seriously hurt, and I’d try to help the participants after the fight was over.. As such, would I have “failed” the so-called-test here?

Honestly, the people who write such stuff and do those “tests” of theirs should think things and people’s motivations a little more deeply before rushing to conclusions.

And to make it worse, the graphics and physics are really really bad. It’s more like a PS2 game then a next gen game. And is it fun? No. GTA IV is fun, play that and then review the game.

Well I have played GTA IV.. It’s not bad.. The story is great and the missions are mostly fun, but that was never what GTA was supposed to be about. In previous GTA versions I spent countless hours just ripping around the city, running people over, shooting cops, finding the best jumps and flying my sportbike over buildings.

All that unconstrained fun is gone in GTA IV. The cars are painfully slow and handle like bags of garbage. You can’t turn a corner without crashing into a wall. Just when you pick up some speed you hit a tiny tree and get thrown from your car.

The bikes aren’t any better. Everything but the sport bikes have a top end of what feels like 80km/h. And there aren’t nearly as many jumps around.. Stairs will just make you crash. The whole concept of speed is seriously flawed. You can roll down a hill at what feels about 30km/h, then hit the hand brake and do a 180. It’s like in an attempt to make handling more realistic they made it worse than realistic.

GTA IV is not a bad game, but after the missions are played there’s no reason to stick with it. Haven’t bought Saints row, but I will now. Sounds like it’s everything that GTA IV isn’t.

It may be true that most violent people play violent video games. But this does not mean violent video games cause people to be violent. Most people who play violent video games never commit violent crimes in real life.

This is basic logic really… “carrots are orange. Therefore everything that is orange is a carrot”.. Obviously that logic is flawed. So is “Violent people play violent video games. Therefore violent video games cause violence”.

Agreed. Also, consider that these violent video games may be an outlet for their more violent tendencies, or satisfy the violent part of their personality. I’d rather they have an outlet such as this for it, rather than having them explode one day from bottling it all up and going on a violent rampage.

It may be true that most violent people play violent video games. But this does not mean violent video games cause people to be violent.

Random assignment helps to get around this issue, self-selection bias, as well. In a general population sample, yes that would be a problem, unless you have an exogenous (independent) shock to cause people to play violent games. In the controlled experiment the fact that a person is playing a violent game instead of a non-violent game is independent of his or her choice.

While it usually is not a good idea to throw around big conclusion about the exact manner of causality in these studies, it is pretty safe to say their isn’t a problem with self-selection.

It’s almost impossible to prove a cause /effect relationship with an issue this complex because there are too many confounding variables that are almost impossible to control for. It’s easy to prove a relationship that “violent people are likely to play violent video games”. But it is almost impossible to prove that violent video games are the cause.

It’s almost impossible to prove a cause /effect relationship with an issue this complex because there are too many confounding variables that are almost impossible to control for.

You might be amazed at to what you can control for in some studies if you have the right data, but thats if you don’t have random assignment…

Anyway, there is no “proof” in these types of tests. There is only “statistical signficance” and that is if your experiment pans out well. Then there is your own interpretation of that “statistical significance.”

In this case you can rule out the explanations of self selection and other underlying sample differences as the source of the results because of random assignment. Nobody in this study selected to play violent games, because they were randomly assigned to play the violent instead of the non-violent. In addition, with a large enough sample there is no reason to think the two experimental groups are different on average ex ante.

In any case the scope of this study is rather small. My interpretation would go something like this: The group that played violent games exhibited behavior relative to the group that played the non-violent games that is consistent with a hypothesis that violent games desensitizes people to violence in the very short term. It says nothing about whether these effects are or could be cumulative or even if being desensitized causes a person to become more violent.

It says nothing about whether these effects are or could be cumulative or even if being desensitized causes a person to become more violent.

The problem is that without any form of a baseline, there really isn’t a sane thing to say. If I had presented this plan for my bachelor’s thesis back when I was studying Psychology, I would’ve been sent home with a pat on my back and a free stuffed animal.

Like someone else aleady mentioned, there are so many uncontrolled variables in here that it’s impossible to lay any form of a causal relationship between violent video games and the observed behaviour. Who knows, maybe the violent games were faster paced, causing more strain on the body and the brain, which in turn affected the reaction times of people – a completely random guess, but something I find a lot more plausible than the observed behaviour being caused by a few pixellated drops of blood flying around.

The problem with these types of studies is that they make headline news, and are mostly interpreted by journalists/readers who lack any scientific education, or who have no idea just how goddamn complex the human brain and nervous system is. Someone here likened the human brain to a supercomputer – which is completely ridiculous. The brain actually works NOTHING like a computer, so saying it could be affected in similar ways a computer gets affected is nonsense.

And even if you COULD prove a causal relationship, then there’s no way of telling if violence in video games would actually cause more or less of the observed behaviour than other forms of violence – movies, the news, presidents going to war causing 100000 deaths – you know, that sort of thing.

But as I said, the lack of a baseline means you cannot draw any sane comparison. This is a bogus study.

But as I said, the lack of a baseline means you cannot draw any sane comparison. This is a bogus study.

Once again, you don’t need a baseline. Can you explain why they need a baseline when the point of comparison is between what they label “violent” and “non-violent” where the two are randomly assigned? Or can you explain why underlying qualites between the two randomly assigned samples are different without speculation? One of the authors of the study did a similar study where instead of using the reaction to the mock fight the used physiological readings. They did have baseline.

Once again, you don’t need a baseline. Can you explain why they need a baseline when the point of comparison is between what they label “violent” and “non-violent” where the two are randomly assigned?

I should’ve been more clear. What I meant was that they need a control group, a group that has NOT been exposed to any video games. For all we know, that group would have had results similar to the “violent” group, which would’ve raised different questions. Without it, there is no way to tell if the violent group had increased reaction times compared to unexposed people, of if the non-violent group had decreased reaction times compared to non-exposed people.

Without it, there is no way to tell if the violent group had increased reaction times compared to unexposed people, of if the non-violent group had decreased reaction times compared to non-exposed people.

I agree with you that there is nothing you can say from this study about the overall effects, but the point of comparision is relative. From what I have found they did take physiological baselines, but not the reaction time baselines. There is a possibility that for whatever reason the “non-violent” games increased the reaction speeds of the subjects and so did the violent games, but less so. I don’t find that very likely, but you might find it more likely, but it seems inconsistent with their other study that indicates subjects having played “violent” versus “non-violent” heartrates etc were lower viewing video of real violence. I wish the paper was out to see how they addressed this issue.

I forgot to mention that I do agree with your point on what about these “violent” games was causing the reaction thats why I use the quotation marks.

I did not play SR2 on XBox, I played it on PC. And I played it about 30 minutes. Just because this game is a superior crap! I have never seen such crap in my life! Maybe it is fun on XBox, but totally unplyable on PC – buggy, stpuid car handling, you simply crash into everything because of it, awful graphics and game runs very slow etc. Awful game!